John Bristowe's Weblog

MOVE: New Blog Address!

Sat, 09 Aug 2003 13:31:53 GMT

I've decided to free myself from Radio by switching to DasBlog 1.1. The new address is here:

http://www.bristowe.com/blog/

RSS feed is here

http://www.bristowe.com/blog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss.

Many thanks to Clemens and friends for DasBlog!

Please make sure to update your aggregators!

COOL: Heavy

Fri, 08 Aug 2003 13:55:18 GMT

Like WDDG, the boys and girls over at Heavy deserve a ton of respect. First time plugger, long time surfer.

Q: Future Plans?

Fri, 08 Aug 2003 13:23:05 GMT

My friend, Jason Beres writes:

"What are you going to do in Alberta? If you want, i will invest in a snow removal service if you run the rigs."

Not a great investiment, Jason. To see why, let's take a look at the numbers. As you can see, we don't get - what Canadians could classify as - a great deal of snow. However, it's cold as Hell up there during the winter. I remember returning home (many times) absolutely frozen after playing hockey on "the pond" all day. Ah, those were the good old days. I wonder how the CBHA is doing?

To be honest, I don't know what I plan to do with myself back home. Write a book? Develop software? Consult? *SHRUG* Or maybe I could follow Eric's lead and become the .NET Canuck?

FUNNY: Accordion Video Day

Fri, 08 Aug 2003 13:07:26 GMT

Crank it!

http://accordionguy.blogware.com/Video/2003/08/accordion_guy_does_britney.mov

After watching this, I must admit: Joey's got game. On a side note, I can't help but think of this when I hear him play.

COOL: Active Directory Application Mode (AD/AM)

Fri, 08 Aug 2003 00:40:31 GMT

Active Directory Application Mode (AD/AM) has raised eyebrows. It provides developers an opportunity to incorporate the richness of AD into their applications without its headaches of deployment and support. It achieves this by having instances run as non-OS services, thereby eliminating the need for a domain controller.

AD/AM is available from MS Downloads here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9688f8b9-1034-4ef6-a3e5-2a2a57b5c8e4

A scenario I can't help but think about is using AD/AM in conjunction with Authorization Manager (AzMan).

READ: G33ks. W00t.

Fri, 08 Aug 2003 00:17:52 GMT

Eric hits us again:

http://software.ericsink.com/Geek_Gauntlets.html

Awesome.

Q: PDC Bloggers

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 22:03:44 GMT

WTF?!

$ whois pdcbloggers.net

Registrant:
*******, ***** (...)
   ...

   Domain Name: PDCBLOGGERS.NET

   Administrative Contact:
      ...
   Technical Contact:
      ...

   Record expires on 29-May-2004.
   Record created on 29-May-2003.
   Database last updated on 6-Aug-2003 17:56:10 EDT.

   Domain servers in listed order:

   ...

Drew: Did a squatter beat you to the punch? :-(

COOL: NNTP Support in NewsGator v1.3

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 21:49:12 GMT

Serious props to Greg Reinacker for adding NNTP support to NewsGator. Goodbye, Outlook Express!

NEW: AzMan on W2K

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 19:09:06 GMT

Released earlier today:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=7edde11f-bcea-4773-a292-84525f23baf7

Mucho fantastico!

FYI: INETA Infrastructure - Then, Now, and Soon

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 16:33:54 GMT

INETA Infrastructure

Our team consists of the following members:

Chris Goldfarb
Devin Rader
Jason Beres
John Bristowe
Keith Franklin
Shervin Shakibi

We are committed to serving the INETA community at-large anyway we can. However, it's important to note that we all serve in a volunteer capacity. That stated, sometimes it can be difficult to facilitate requests in a timely manner. Despite this, we work very hard to squash each and every bug we find.

On a personal note: I love volunteering for INETA and I am honored to be a member of the Infrastructure committee. I have never met so many passionate people in one organization who are determined to serve a community the best way they can.

INETA Website

A new version of the Website (http://www.ineta.org/) was deployed shortly after TechEd 2003.

Presently, my team is firefighting issues that come down the pipeline. We recently squashed a number of bugs related to view state. (This was resolved by persisting session state in SQL Server.) With luck, we hope to have the site completely stable by next week.

INETA vNext

The Infrastructure committee is currently planning ahead to vNext to incorporate a ton of change requests in the queue. We are focusing on a number of key features including:

More administration features
Better internationalization (i18n) support
Increased extensibility

admin.ineta.org

We are hoping to push administration to a new level with this Website (http://admin.ineta.org/). Currently, the site only serves as a test-bed for a read-only scenario. Eventually, a security policy will be applied.

This site represents some of our push for better i18n support, as evidenced by addresses. Example:

http://admin.ineta.org/groups/?userGroupID=14

Lack of i18n support is a huge problem for us at the moment. A large number of group leaders have reported problems while registering their user groups. Additionally, some views of these addresses don't make much sense. For example, Canada has provinces, not states. ;-)

We want to be able to support as many different types of addresses as we can. i18n is a huge change request for us that we're pushing very hard.

blogs.ineta.org

Coming soon. (Hopefully.)

bugs.ineta.org

We have recently installed FogBUGZ to help coordinate bugs and feature requests. The Infrastructure committee uses FogBUGZ extensively to help improve the site. We also use SourceGear's Vault as our code repository.

Both are excellent pieces of software and are highly recommended.

INETA Events

We are working with Steven Smith (ASPAlliance.com) and friends (including Mitch Denny, Kent Sharkey, and Jeff Julian) on a new framework for event aggregation:

http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/Workspaces/workspace.aspx?id=a3b4fcdd-efcc-4aae-b57b-da2d164e4ba0

Event sharing is a really exciting notion that the INETA Infrastructure committee would like to support. The hope is to turn the knob up on communication amongst various entities (i.e. ASPAlliance.com, MSDN, INETA user groups) via aggregation. Imagine a scenario where a user could view a calendar displaying all INETA-related events for the current month. Even better, imagine a pub/sub model where event-related announcements are delivered via .NET Alerts, iCalendar items, or RSS. Our hope is to facilitate this communication by providing a standard and an implementation. Exciting stuff indeed.

INETA Web Services

Anyone who knows me knows that I want to implement INETA-related Web services very, very badly. Personally, I see an incredible opportunity for collaboration among INETA members by exposing SOAP endpoints.

ANN: Moving Home (Calgary, AB)

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 00:32:41 GMT

It is with a heavy heart that I announce that I have given notice to my employer, Empowered Software Solutions (ESS). I will be moving back home (Calgary, AB, Canada) later this month to help take care of my grandparents. My grandfather suffers from an advanced case of Parkinson's disease while my grandmother suffers from scoliosis and macular degeneration.

Deciding to move back home was a tough decision; ESS is an utterly-fantastic .NET consulting firm and have treated me wonderfully. However, family comes first. That stated, I look forward to being home with my family after spending five years abroad (Australia, USA). In the meantime, I will continue to blog, write, present, code, volunteer, and work on anything/everything related to .NET and Web services.

NEW: NewsGator v1.3 Released

Tue, 05 Aug 2003 14:49:32 GMT

http://www.newsgator.com/news/archive.aspx?post=20

Rock and roll!

Drew's Off To Japan

Sat, 02 Aug 2003 13:45:10 GMT

http://erablog.net/filters/17134.post

Good luck, Drew.

(Lucky bastard. I wish I could go to Japan to talk about WSE v2.0.)

NEW: Chi-Town Blogger

Sat, 02 Aug 2003 13:42:16 GMT

http://weblogs.asp.net/BDesmond/

Welcome, Brian. Good to hear you're a Cubs fan. :-)

READ: The Ivory Tower of Software Development

Sat, 02 Aug 2003 13:00:38 GMT

http://radio.weblogs.com/0117167/2003/08/01.html#a410

Bravo.

Begging for Whidbey

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 18:43:46 GMT

Robert Scoble mentions that "begging on a weblog is a great way" to try and get on the Whidbey beta. Fantastic. Where's the "begging" emoticon?

WOW: BuyMusic.com

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 02:20:15 GMT

Checked out BuyMusic.com tonight. Very impressive. I bought a few songs, downloaded them into my "Audio" folder, and played away. $0.99 for a track. And, the track I want without having to buy the whole CD. Wow! Way cool!

Oh, and the site's running on ASP.NET. (My inner geek couldn't resist.)

MUSIC: Subliminal Sessions Five

Sat, 26 Jul 2003 19:30:58 GMT

I've been listening to Erick Morillo's latest:

Wow. Un-real.

ANTI-LEGEND: Eric Sink

Thu, 24 Jul 2003 18:11:23 GMT

http://www.notalegend.com/

Priceless. :-)

BLOG: Steve Maine

Wed, 23 Jul 2003 15:31:23 GMT

Steve Maine's been playing with WSE v2.0 also:

http://hyperthink.net/blog/

Coolio.

NEW: NUnit v2.1 Beta 1

Wed, 23 Jul 2003 04:55:25 GMT

Everyone's favorite unit testing framework just got a little better:

http://nunit.sf.net/

NUnit v2.1 Beta 1 was released yesterday.

RUMOR: Eric Morillo to Retire?

Wed, 23 Jul 2003 04:34:54 GMT

http://www.djmag.com/pages/whats_up.cgi?file=whats_up20030721dj.csv&;topic=djs

Say it ain't so, Eric. :-(

SSL/TLS in Windows Server 2003

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 19:50:15 GMT

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=a9c6b790-050c-4ac8-b065-b166e8f7db0b

A great read for down & dirty geeks.

FYI: Another FYI From Scott Hanselman

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 19:47:51 GMT

Another great FYI - this time on an i18n gotcha and SIDs - from the Scott:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0106747/2003/07/21.html#a394

Issues arise when we make assumptions. Amen.

NEW: KBAlertz RSS Feeds

Sun, 20 Jul 2003 14:03:08 GMT

Dave Wanta has (finally) added RSS feeds to his KBAlertz Website:

http://www.kbalertz.com/rss/msall.xml (example)

Wahoo! Way to go, Dave!